Hi Ty, and welcome to the Wine Board. Am sure somebody makes one somewhere Down Under. The closest I'm aware of is Rosemount Traminer Riesling ($8).

If you don't mind, I'd like to ask why? So long as there are values available where they make things best, it is best to get that kind of wine from there. The best and best value gewurztraminer comes from Alsace. Australia is wonderful for shiraz and red blends. New Zealand does sauvignon blanc good.

My friends have started a wine club where we pick a certain grape and everyone picks a region and has to select a bottle of wine from that region and describe the unique characteristics that region and the selected vineyard bring to the wine. Somebody else already has Alsace - I thought Australia/New Zealand would be different. I found a website which had Kemblefield Gewurztraminer 2001 as winning a blue-gold ribbon in the Sydney International Top 100 Wine Competition so I may check that one out. Any other suggestions would be welcome!

I have to admit, have neither seen nor tasted Gewurztraminer from down under.
You want a suggestion that would brighten up the club's night? Try a Gewurztraminer produced in NY State. There are some fine ones from the Finger Lakes region and one in particular from Long Island.

We had a very nice Huia Gewurtz at a tasting this past spring and bought two bottles. Both are gone now, but as I recall they were nicely dry but fruity, not with what seems too much RS like quite a few CA Gewurtz's. The price was about $12. So, if you go to your local wine shop and ask the manager to check with the Huia distributor, you may be in luck.

Thanks for everyone's help! We weren't able to find a wine store that carries a NZ or Australian Gewurtz in time so we went w/a NY Gewurtz - from Martha Clara vineyard out in LI. It was ok. We really enjoyed one someone brought from Oregon of all places! Covey Run I think it was called. I highly recommend that one.

I went out for a light dinner with friends this evening and although I'm making progress in learning about wine, a wine list is still quite intimidating to me. Not too many things I recognized on the list. For instance, the only SB they had was from Chile. No experience there. They had three chardonnays all from CA and I was afraid they'd be oaky. Since I was the only one drinking wine I ordered a glass of Rosemount Traminer Riesling about which I had some frame of reference. It was sweeter than I'd expected, but it was chilled nicely and tasted delicious. I ordered a grilled chicken salad with raspberry vinaigrette which seemed to go well with the wine. Wish I could say I really knew what I was doing. But I do know a little more than I did a few months ago. Embarrassingly enough, however, I didn't know how to pronounce the /i/ in Traminer. Miner as in coal miner, or miner as in meaner than a junkyard dog?

As for the /i/, I've heard most French and Germans I know pronounce it like the "ee" in Winoweenie. Most Americans seem to say a short /i/, as in the "i" in Innkeeper.

Most restaurant servers and even many wine purveyors don't seem too concerned about pronunciation of non-English words, so don't be too embarrassed! Even at store-sponsored wine tastings, I hear all sorts of versions of Spanish words--not exactly music to Quijote's ears, but the message gets across....

And Georgie, I can sympathize with the "wine list overload" thing. The nice thing about going to stores is that we can read the back labels and posted descriptions, but at restaurants we're pretty much at the mercy of our own knowledge. I would like to see more restaurants offer at least brief descriptions, or perhaps some basic profile data, on their wines. So many restaurants offer thumbnail descriptions of their food, so why not the wine? I also like how more restaurants are ordering their wine lists by way of a taste or mouthfeel order (sweet-to-dry, or light-to-full-bodied) or some other such concept to allow patrons to make more informed assessments.

Well, however it's pronounced (and thanks everybody for your help,) it was delicious. I'm going to see if I can find it anywhere. I don't recall ever seeing it in the shops. Oh, and since our waiter spoke Spanish way better than English I'm sure HE didn't care how I said it. [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/smile.gif[/img]